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Some NFL Teams Are Going Green

Falcons and 49ers Focus on Environment With New Stadium Features

Levi's Stadium, the new home of the San Francisco 49ers, aims to be the most environmentally sustainable venue in the NFL. WSJ's Jim Carlton takes a hard-hat tour of the near-completed facility to see their green efforts up close.

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The $1.2 billion stadium will be the first in the National Football League to feature a "living roof," a canopy of green and flowering plants nestled across the top of an eight-story tower of luxury suites to reduce the building's energy use and offer other environmental benefits by providing natural insulation.

The 18,000-square-foot living roof is one a number of green features included in the new home of the 49ers, who are at the vanguard of a growing trend: NFL clubs, world famous for their hard knocks on the gridiron, are trying to show a gentler side through emerging green programs to reduce energy emissions. They are using solar panels, wind turbines, electric charging stations and other low-carbon alternatives in America's most watched sport.

Teaming Up

The NFL is part of a general effort among U.S. professional and collegiate sports leagues to embrace cleaner energy, led in part by a group launched in 2011 calling itself the Green Sports Alliance, co-founded by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen's
Vulcan Inc. Mr. Allen is also the owner of the NFL champion Seattle Seahawks. The alliance's membership has grown to more than two-thirds of Major League Baseball teams, half of the National Hockey League and nearly half of the NFL, as well as 21 NCAA Division I universities.

Alliance officials say sports teams that go green help boost public awareness of environmental goals, like cleaner and more efficient energy, while also benefiting their operations by lowering their energy costs.

Levi's Stadium will also have solar-panel-clad pedestrian bridges carrying fans to a parking lot where they can charge their electric vehicles.
Jamie Tanaka for the Wall Street Journal

"Everywhere you turn, it's a win-win," says Scott Jenkins, chairman and president of the alliance, and general manager of the New Atlanta Stadium, which is set to open in 2017 as home of the NFL's Atlanta Falcons. Among other green features, the $1.2 billion facility will include a rainwater-collection system to use for irrigation and cooling, Mr. Jenkins says.

According to many critics, the NFL's efforts are long overdue. The league has the world's highest average game attendance, but it's seen by some as a laggard in green measures compared with other global sporting leagues.

In a 2013 study, for example, Danyel Reiche, an assistant professor of comparative politics at the American University of Beirut, found that only a minority of NFL teams had undertaken green programs.

Mr. Reiche credits 10 of the NFL's 32 clubs with embarking on formal green-energy programs, led by the New York Jets and Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, New England Patriots and Seattle. The 49ers, members of that fraternity, will burnish their green credentials with this year's opening of Levi's Stadium, he says.

But the NFL itself, Mr. Reiche says, which is supposed to lead the clubs, "is doing nothing" to get clubs to change apart from disseminating information. Mr. Reiche suggests that the NFL set standards—for instance, making mandatory for stadiums to adopt carbon-offsetting measures, like electric-vehicle charging stations, to make up for emissions from teams' travel to away games.

NFL officials say they don't have the authority to mandate such changes, since the league is an association of team owners. But it has pushed green practices for the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl, says Jack Groh, director of the NFL's environmental program. He says the NFL helped persuade food vendors at this year's Super Bowl in New Jersey to stop using plastic-foam containers.

Team owners have taken it upon themselves to act, in varying degrees, Mr. Groh says: "Some of the team ownership is more aggressive than others, and that's just human nature."

Among the first to go green were the Philadelphia Eagles, who have installed features including energy-saving timers and sensors for lighting and cooling equipment in Lincoln Financial Field since it opened in 2003, says team president Don Smolenski. Other features include 11,000 solar panels and 14 wind turbines that were installed in 2012. Energy-saving features have cut the team's power consumption by half over the past decade, Mr. Smolenski says.

New Jersey's MetLife Stadium—home of the Giants and Jets—included solar panels, refrigeration sensors and other green features when it opened in 2010, says stadium spokeswoman Nicole Fountain. Those have helped cut the stadium's energy use by as much as 20% over the past three years, she says.

Other teams highlighted in Mr. Reiche's report as having green programs include the Houston Texans, Minnesota Vikings, St. Louis Rams and Washington Redskins. Among their features: the Texans' said they created an interactive media guide, saving 2.6 million pages used in printing; the Redskins have installed solar panels at their FedEx Field; the Rams have printed game tickets on recycled paper; and the Vikings have put in reduced-flow plumbing at the players' clubhouse and training areas.

When Levi's Stadium, the NFL's newest venue, opens, 49ers officials say they want it to include state-of-the-art green technologies, in part as a nod to the San Francisco region's reputation for innovation.

At Levi's Stadium, where the San Francisco 49ers will play starting this year, environmentally friendly features will include an 18,000-square-foot 'living roof.'
Jamie Tanaka for the Wall Street Journal

Energy Neutral

"Where we are, in Silicon Valley, it's sort of our mandate," 49ers President Paraag Marathe says on a recent tour of the 68,500-seat facility. "If it wasn't environmentally responsible, we wouldn't be as successful."

The playing field is carpeted with drought-tolerant Bandera Bermuda grass, which uses half the water of typical sports turf used in the Bay Area, Mr. Marathe says. More than 1,000 solar panels are being installed—high atop the stadium, and on three pedestrian bridges connecting to a parking lot, where electric-vehicle charging stations also are being put in. NRG Energy Inc. and SunPower Corp. have worked with the 49ers to make the stadium net energy neutral, which means it is expected to generate all the energy it needs for the team's 10 home games.

The red stadium seats were made in nearby Fremont, Calif., rather than imported from overseas, in part to save energy on shipping, while wood for cocktail counters in a rooftop lounge was recycled from a local airfield hangar, Mr. Marathe says. The lounge area is flanked by the living roof, which gives it a parklike setting to go along with the scenic views.

Like at a growing number of NFL stadiums, 49ers officials say they will encourage fans to use public transit more. But that hasn't always worked smoothly. After the Seahawks demolished the Denver Broncos 43-8 in the Super Bowl on Feb. 2 at MetLife Stadium, many of the people who attended the game had to wait for hours to board overloaded transit trains.

The NFL's Mr. Stroh, though, says the system worked as designed.

"Yeah, it was a bit crowded and there were some waits for trains," he says. "(But) the good side is so many people opted for mass transit."

Mr. Carlton is a senior special writer in the San Francisco bureau of The Wall Street Journal. He can be reached at jim.carlton@wsj.com.